The Reichsfilmarchiv was opened on 4 February 1935 in Harnack House, Dahlem, Berlin, in the presence of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, with an enormous flurry of propaganda.
[1] After their arrival in Berlin in April 1945, Soviet troops seized the Reichsfilmarchiv and took possession of all its surviving film material.
By the end of World War II in 1945, not only through the normal channels of acquisition, but also in large part through seizure and confiscation in territories occupied by Nazi Germany during WWII, the collection had grown to 17,352 films.
After the end of the war most of these films, many of which had been stored in the bell tower of the Berlin Olympic Stadium, were lost.
When in 1955 the State Film Archive of the DDR was founded, it was permitted to take over a proportion of the collection.